NOTES/CORRECTIONS: Correction: the conservative National Party (not to be confused with Gounraris' more economically-moderate Nationalist Party) supported the war.
My great grandmother hid a jewish doctor during the Holocaust in Thessaloniki.She used to tell me that she felt sorry for him because she knew her pain. She was pontic greek who was forced to leave her homeland during ww1
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, collects stories like this. You can submit in their website. It's really important to recognize and honor those who helped us when we needed the most. May her memory forever be a blessing
As a Greek, the political history of Greece from the 1910s onwards is just so frustrating to listen to. We really never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Venizelos was too forward thinking for his time
Venizelos was quite good during the Cretan issue and his first term. When it came to anything after he was a straight up dipshit. I will give him that his participation to world war 1 was justified at the end because he expanded Greece a lot and that he was the first to eliminate the king. However this, the war, came at the cost of people of Greece (think about how a workers movement was developed at the speed of light during his terms). Beyond that his he, after the Asia minor disaster with HE DID have a huge part in, gave hope to the displaced people of Asia minor that they"ll have their homes back while knowing that this was an impossible undertaking and then ending those hopes abruptly via the lozanny convention and openly recommending fucking Attaturk for a nobel peace prize to the knowledge of the people of Asia minor! After that Venizelos like a true "democrat voted in the first anti-communist law(because free speech Amirite) and tried 2 millitary movements to bring down the government (though the second one I get because fuck Kondylis). In addition we should talk about how his followers the "liberals" voted in Metaxas ( a oroto-fascists and hitlerite ) for fear of the "communist danger" and during ww2 mostly sided with fascists and nazis and were the ones that enacted the pogroms of jews in Thessaloniki.
The most famous Salonikan Jews in America are the actors Hank Azaria and Lea Michele. Up until now, the only grave visit in the series was Maimonides. But now we’re at a point where a good chunk of the people mentioned are buried in Israel. This could become a recurring theme.
Ladino is fascinating, I made a video on it.. And it is rare that a language is able to keep itself in such an urban environment without a rural hinterland to draw from. A shame the Jewish Ladino speakers of Salonika suffered so badly later, gutting the core of the language and its demographic base.
In times like these, the famous quote by Yigal Alon, "A nation not honoring its past, lives a present of little substance and faces a future is clouded in doubt", gets a deeper meaning. Thank you for continuing the series, you're doing an important and amazing work and it only keeps getting even better
It's always amazing when you get to actually visit places/monuments mentioned in your videos and I'm sure it will become a lot more common as we move further into the modern era. Especially nice to see you rest a stone on Benaroya's grave!
I love that you touched upon the politics of the balkan sephardim , my family is from Izmir , salonika and Crete and its nice seeing some content about these communities which are often underlooked
This was a really captivating story. The stone on the grave at the end is very poignant. I love your very detailed, well researched and presented videos. I’m going to have to go find those 2 videos where you discussed the outbreak of WWI. Stay safe!
Being familiar with the Carassos of Salonika through Danone yogurt, I had absolutely no idea Isaac’s uncle had proposed Jewish autonomy in Salonika, and now I’ll spend a considerable part of next week contemplating that alternate history
great video sam, can't really explain how much i needed such a captivating video to forget even if for a bit what's been going on right now just 30 kilometers south from my house. thank you sam!
In the early 20th Century when Turkish and Rhodes Jews started settling in Seattle and constructing the Ladino community, several prominent members were Benaroya family who came in from Salonika. I wonder if they have anything to do with the story...
What is the controversy? I find it vicariously frustrating that basically everyone's efforts on all sides were undone over the next 30 years: Greece overplayed its hand and lost most of its territorial gains from Turkey, the monarchy was overthrown, the Venizelists turned against the Jewish community and some of them committed a pogrom, Greece became a (pro-Allied) fascist dictatorship, the Nazis invaded, almost the entire Jewish population was wiped out, and then there was a civil war.
@@SamAronow the pro allied metaxas government could hardly be considered fascist it did copy the image but in policy it was very different first of all it has many pro-minority stances and was generally liked by the Jewish and Muslim communities and had many socialist policies with chief of labour being a communist, it lacked any expansionist or revisionist not even claiming the Dodecanese Islands in hopes of building better relations with Italian and promoted neutrality also lt had hopes that after it democracy would return and lastly if you remove the crack down on the Communists it to was tolerante of different ideology (it can be seen by many venizelist high ranking officers in the military
Glad to see you making new content. Learning about this history is more important than ever with the recent turmoil. I love your shoutout to Benaroya. I never heard of the man before, so thank you for giving him the recognition he deserved.
Great video as usual! Not to "BALKANS MENTIONED", but it is great to see this story covered, since I had felt as though throughout this entire series, much of the Jewish history in non-Palestine Ottoman lands had largely been overlooked, given that the most major developments were typically either in Western Europe, the Pale in the East, or Palestine, just some mentions here and there. I hope this might eventually lead to a video or two covering the history of Judaism either in the Balkans specifically, or more broadly the Ottoman Empire beyond Palestine, talking about groups such as the Romanyotim and the broader impact of the Sephardim in Jewish life in areas such as Greece, Anatolia and the Ottoman Balkans, as well as any figures that might be important to discuss specific in those contexts. The history of the Jewish people in these areas feels immensely undercovered, both domestically and internationally, so it would be amazing to see something like that covered, especially as a gentile Serb, since what very little I know of Jewish history in Serbia already shows it to have plenty of highs and lows.
Great video as always! Glad to see Bulgaria mentioned in a possitive light, especially with admitting things like the WMORO and Dimitar Wlahow being Bulgarian (which weirdly very rare). Not many Bulgarians know about Beneroja but he is very influential to us aswell, since he was one of the founding members of the BRSDP which would later go on to play a major role in our history trough splitting and forming the BKP out of said split, but it itself largely copied Beneroja's work in Thessaloniki. (It's also refreshing to see it shown albeit not mentioned that Greek authorities deported the Bulgarian population from Thessaloniki since that's very often denied) Sad to know that next time Bulgaria is mentioned (if it even is) it will be trough the willingness of the government to sacrifice the Jews from Macedonia and Thrace (with the collaboration of the locals, in contrast with the Old Bulgaria citizens, who demanded the end of all deportations and protested them actively, meanwhile Macedonians hapilly took the left over property of their former Jewish neighbours) in order to save the Jews in the core territory, although I am still proud to say that the Bulgarian Exarchate (which back then wasn't corrupted by Communist intervention in church affairs yet) helped defend the rights of the Jews, and although it's highly debatable, I like to believe that, for whatever reason, be it his Jewish friends or his religiosity or love of the people, Boris III helped too. Keep up the good work and even though I already commented it on your other posts I hope and pray that you, your family and your friends are safe wherever they are and that NYC is hospitable to your arrival!
Can't wait for a more detailed treatment of the topic of Jews in (my native) Bulgaria. We do learn about saving our own Jews during the Holocaust. We learn less reliably about all the Jews we did help send to the concentration camps from other Balkan territories in the 1940s. But we don't really learn about who those Bulgarian Jews are, how they came here. We don't learn about what role they played in the first decades of the newly restored Bulgaria.
Bulgarian Jew here! My grandmother, who was born in Sofia, told me that the vast majority of the Bulgarian community was Sephardic and spoke Ladino, with Bulgarian as a second native language. They played a significant role in the healthcare system of the new Bulgaria after the collapse of the ottoman empire, but she never told me about any outsized role the Jewish community had back then. She did miss Bulgaria until her very last days, and she was ecstatic during their 1994 World Cup campaign 😊
I am not Bulgarian, but I am Jewish and went to Bulgarian years ago when I was a teenager. I cannot tell you how unnerving it was for everyone who learned or could tell I was Jewish to tell me, IMMEDIATELY, how they loved "their Jews" and saved "their Jews" during the Holocaust (and for me to later find out the limits of the historical reality of those statements), especially when juxtaposed with the evidence of Bulgaria's very poor treatment of the Roma minority. But I did love visiting the country and have always hoped to go back someday. Truly an incredibly rich culture of music and dance. And the food was great too.
Your videos are so well done! You manage to combine plenty of information and explain it in a manner which is easy to assimilate. Thank you for your work! I'm going to make my way through as many of them as possible..
I did that thing where you hit the share button and copied the link to the video to boost its exposure. Any other viewers can do the same thing to help the video gain traction in the youtube algorithm.
There is an Irish folk song called Salonika that mentions the Irish soldiers stationed there as part of the Allies. Also, I think this is the reason why modern Irish folk music incorporated the bouzouki.
The bouzouki came to Ireland through Moynihan in the 60s, according to Wikipedia at least. It doesn't make sense that Irish troops would bring it since the bouzouki came to mainland Greece in large numbers only with the arrival of the Anatolian refugees. Macedonia, the area around Salonika was dominated by bagpipes, zurna flutes, tympans and violins in the area of Chalcidice. At the same time a tradition of copper wind instruments which have largely replaced the aforementioned wooden ones also started to see rise, but no real sight of the bouzouki in the area yet.
Great video! One small correction though - Dimitar Vlahov was a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party at the time, but he was Macedonian. Later in life when Macedonia was liberated and joined the Yugoslav federation, he was a member of the Presidency of ASNOM.
You might be thinking of "western/european modern buddism"(you know "keep the silhouette,empty the inside). Now i would suggest you look at Myanmar/Burmania and the Rohyingya people.
@@alexandrub8786As if Buddhism is the problem there. People are going to hate those who differ from them no matter the religion, at least Buddhist teaching doesn't encourage it unlike abrahamic religions. Rohingya would've certainly faired worse in the west considering how we treated Roma and Muslims
@@unilajamuha91 this was not an attack on buddish,how you seem to have taken it. It is ,however, an attack at the idea that putting another religion in that region would make things better.
@@unilajamuha91 but considering that the buddist monks are proponents of it and one idea for the support of it being buddist nationalism maybe you are right that the religion(i.e. buddism) is part of the problem,at least in what partain the last wave of anti-rohyingyanism from late 2010' to today. It-being the Rohyingya genocide.
@@alexandrub8786 Religious tensions were a major part of the conflict. I mean, the reasons why Bosnian Serbs and Bosniaks aren't the same people and genocided eachother is religion. Removing this differences would definitely calm things down, and even if we assigned different nations to different schools of Buddhism, it still will be a major difference, Buddhist infighting is very minor compared to Abrahamic religions "As many people as many ways"
It took me 6 times watching it (what do you mean, you don't watch Sam Aronow's videos a dozen times?) to realize in the shower that "Federación" is the Ladino translation of the Yiddish "Bund" (meaning something close to "league")
NL- Los Angeles Dodgers AL- Chicago White Sox (RIP Sam Aronow the Elder) CCL- Arroyo Seco Saints (Pasadena) NCAA II - Cal State LA Golden Eagles/San Francisco State Gators NPB- Hanshin Tigers Israeli (2007)- Tel Aviv Lightning Israeli (future)- Andromeda Jaffa WBC/Olympics- whichever countries you wouldn't expect to be there; failing that, Canada and Mexico.
I realize this is a super minor correction, but I fear Hulonim would absolutely hate to hear you describe their city as a "Tel Aviv suburb". While the two make a continuous urban environment, Hulon is a separate municipality.
I hate the fact that most of the communities mentioned here are gone almost completely apart from some gravestones, cemetaries or old buildings. I wish there were still Ladino speakers to visit in Saloniki, their culture enjoyed, their political organisations still present.
I visited Thessaloniki in 2019. There's still a good museum on the Salonica Jews there, but the community was so devastated by the Nazis that little else remains
Thank you for your kind words for Bulgaria. Usually the country is portrayed in a much more darker view when it comes to the Balkan Wars and the Balkan Jews.
1. Basic is not necessarily bad. 2. One of the big influences on this channel was OSP, and when using Waltz No. 2 I'm trying to convey the same cozy yet mysterious mood that they do when they use it. Whenever I use music from other TH-cam channels, movies, video games, TV shows, I'm trying to convey same tone that those media had when they used it.
Thank you for all the work you have done! The Jewish history of the Thessaloniki is rarely mentioned in Greece today. The biggest university of the city is build in the former Jewish cemetery. I think the plan before the war was to move the cemetery in another in location to make room for the campus. At the end the Nazis completely destroyed it during the occupation.
Adana incidents between turks and armenians from the perspective of british embassy. Ottoman authorities were so unprepared, British consul tried to calm things down (and eventually shot from arm by the armenians i think). "During the whole of the 15th, 16th and 17th April Adana became the scene of wide disorders. At the first sound of firing, the Armenians rushed to their own quarter, where they barricaded themselves and began to shoot at the Turks, who, Major Doughty Wylie reported, hunted them out from every corner and house-top, goaded on by hodjas (hocas-Muslim clerics) and reactionaries. The vali, Cevat Bey, who was a man of good character, but incapable of administering the province, and the ferik (local army commandant), who was Mustafa Remzi Pasha, an old man[75], were paralysed with shock, and retired to the shelter of the Konak (Government House), making no effort to call out the soldiers who could easily have quelled the mob, or to calm the storm. Major Doughty Wylie, the British vice-consul, however, after his arrival at Adana, went straight to Tripanis’s house, which was near the station. There he changed into his uniform, secured an escort, and set off to the Konak. He found himself in the midst of a furious Turco-Armenian carnage[76]. With about 50 Turkish soldiers, whom he got the authorities to place at his disposal, and the commandant of the gendarmerie, Major Doughty Wylie paraded up and down throughout the city with bugles blowing, rescuing foreigners, placing guards over foreign schools and missions and putting a stop to the fighting wherever he went." belleten.gov.tr/tam-metin/1994/eng
wanted to write this in the Nili episode but I saw you locked the comments so ill say it here: 1.are you going to mention the Weitzmann-Faisal agreement in future episodes? 2.seeing how you adressed the Armenian genocide, a heavy subject, and seeing that we are already covering the 20th century, I was wondering how you are going to cover such a heavier and more related subject as the holocaust.
1. I currently expect to mention it after the war. I even foreshadowed it in the Nili video! "...As we shall see after the war, the overlap between Jewish and Arab nationalist interests in 1917 wasn’t actually the existential turning point that later events would suggest." 2. I will go into greater detail on the Holocaust, but not exhaustively so, lest we spend whole years on it. The Second World War should also have an equal if not slightly greater amount of coverage of Jewish perspectives in the war itself, among the Allies and the Yishuv. Many people in Israel or among Americans who are not Jewish forget that the experience of most Jewish-Americans' (or Jews outside Europe generally) experience of that time period was as soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen and their families. My grandpa Sam was an essential worker in the US, uncle David served in China and the Philippines, and my uncle George served in the final downfall of Germany. Operation Torch, the Liberation of France, the Liberation of Italy, the Palestine Blitz, and the Manhattan Project are all full of fascinating Jewish stories I hope to tell when we get to them.
I had to look this up; apparently Jack Benaroya's parents immigrated from Lebanon to Alabama. So they're probably distantly related, but only distantly- similar to Vidal Sassoon (father from Thessaloniki) vs. the more famous Iraqi-Indian Sassoons.
Very interesting as always. By my own research I stumbled over one Jewish figure in pre Ww2 Germany id love to hear more about, Hans - Joachim Schoeps. From what I have seen it's a rather tragic story of a veteran of ww1 being caught up in the nationalist fervor in Germany at the time, but noticing to late he isn't included in those ideas
After greeks took the city there was a great fire mostly affected jewish quarter which made over 50.000 jews homeless. There was also a boycott towards jewish businesses. Venizelos' position was officially ambivalent, sometimes supporting anti semitic attitudes. City's jewish population politically mostly aligned with king constantine against Venizelos.
I honestly wonder what would have happened if democracy had prevailed in the Ottoman Empire before WW1? Might the empire still be around today? Also if it were democratic Would it have stayed neutral or joined the entente? Also I’ve noticed an interesting dichotomy between the ottoman and Russian 3empries during this time. Both were absolutist monarchies that attempted a transition to constituitonal monarchy but essentially ended up under authoritarianism under national sumptemacist leadership. And yet the two empires had basically opposite policies toward Jewish people (until WW1).
So both the Young Turks (CUP) and Young Turks (media) got their name from the generic term "Young Turks" inspired by Sultan Selim III, who came to power at the same time as the first French Revolution and whose attempts at modernization made him a popular figure _in_ Revolutionary France. This phrase then came over to America and weirdly persisted after WWI (possibly because the US specifically avoided ever declaring war on the Ottomans).
Fascinating story of how Bundism spread to Ottoman Salonika. The Jewish autonomy movements could not survive the end of empires and the advent of more homogeneous national states in both Ashkenazi and Sefardi eastern Europe. Nazism was the final blow. A Sefardi from Salonika who fought with the Communist partizans in Greece in WWII told me that the Greek Communists were anti-semitic.
Now that we're in the 20th century I do wonder what your plan is when you catch up Though, g-d help me I think a lot of fresh Jewish history is going to be written in the near future.
At a certain point, events will just be too recent for me to have anything to say. If I ever reach that point without burning out, it'll probably be sometime in the 1990s. But at that point I will be able to just pick and choose what I want to talk about.
@@SamAronow When you get to a point where the people in the events are still alive and active in politics, it's hard to make history about them because we don't KNOW what the historical effects will turn out to BE
@@SamAronow Indeed I do remember that and it was a good sentiment then too. I know you'll keep churning out 99th percentile work either way, no matter what you choose to do. (You're the reason my lovely, convert brother think I'm such a good study, keep it up!)
Nazis left a part of mainland greece to be occupied by bulgaria between 1941-1944. Jews were systematically slaughtered by bulgarian occupation forces, since they occupied the place. In the rest of greece, unfortunately by the end of nazi occupation the germans sent to auswittch, most of the jews of greece. Greek-jews that survived, did so, with the help of their compatriots greeks, who were not antisemitic, as you state in this video , with a lot of confidence. Ask these jews who survived or their descendants, before declaring about greek’s feelings towards the jews.
@@brm5844 Sorry for pointing out that a man who was a partisan and fought against Bulgaria in ww2 for an independent Macedonia was in fact Macedonian, and not Bulgarian.
@@GeoHdReal He was also kicked from ASNOM for speaking with a dialect that they deemed "too Bulgarian", argued that the 1932 decission of the Internationale to recognise Macedonia as a nation was a mistake openly in 1948 and was entirely sidelined and removed from the anthem for "pro-Bulgarian sentiments". None of this is "fascist Tatar propaganda", by your own logic I should be an ethnic Macedonian and this is all accepted facts in Macedonian historiography. Nobody is threatining the modern Macedonian nation by stating that it originates from Bulgaria, and if all it takes for it to be destroyed is for historical facts to stop being falsified, maybe it shouldn't or couldn't exist at all.
@@SamAronow I mean, it basically is exactly the same lol Two nations that used to speak the same language That were founded by the same people but developed very differently throughout history And finally the smaller one hates the bigger one and denies any connections between the two
NOTES/CORRECTIONS:
Correction: the conservative National Party (not to be confused with Gounraris' more economically-moderate Nationalist Party) supported the war.
Gounaris was elected to end the war also his party continued the war, leading to the tragedy which is known as Snyrna's Slaughter
My great grandmother hid a jewish doctor during the Holocaust in Thessaloniki.She used to tell me that she felt sorry for him because she knew her pain. She was pontic greek who was forced to leave her homeland during ww1
Righteous among the nations. Thank her very much.
If she got an Israeli citizenship and her son/daughter, you can too.
Your great-grandmother was a righteous woman!
She felt sorry for him because she felt her pain.
???
So are we doing gender bending in the 1940s?
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, collects stories like this. You can submit in their website. It's really important to recognize and honor those who helped us when we needed the most. May her memory forever be a blessing
As a Greek, the political history of Greece from the 1910s onwards is just so frustrating to listen to. We really never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Venizelos was too forward thinking for his time
Venizelos was quite good during the Cretan issue and his first term. When it came to anything after he was a straight up dipshit. I will give him that his participation to world war 1 was justified at the end because he expanded Greece a lot and that he was the first to eliminate the king. However this, the war, came at the cost of people of Greece (think about how a workers movement was developed at the speed of light during his terms). Beyond that his he, after the Asia minor disaster with HE DID have a huge part in, gave hope to the displaced people of Asia minor that they"ll have their homes back while knowing that this was an impossible undertaking and then ending those hopes abruptly via the lozanny convention and openly recommending fucking Attaturk for a nobel peace prize to the knowledge of the people of Asia minor! After that Venizelos like a true "democrat voted in the first anti-communist law(because free speech Amirite) and tried 2 millitary movements to bring down the government (though the second one I get because fuck Kondylis). In addition we should talk about how his followers the "liberals" voted in Metaxas ( a oroto-fascists and hitlerite ) for fear of the "communist danger" and during ww2 mostly sided with fascists and nazis and were the ones that enacted the pogroms of jews in Thessaloniki.
@@sahhaf1234Anyone who judges the past based on hindsight is bound to reach into wrong(often opposite) conclusions.
The most famous Salonikan Jews in America are the actors Hank Azaria and Lea Michele.
Up until now, the only grave visit in the series was Maimonides. But now we’re at a point where a good chunk of the people mentioned are buried in Israel. This could become a recurring theme.
And in the UK of course you had Vidal Sassoon, whose father was from Thessaloniki.
I didn't know Hank Azaria was Sephardic. You learn something new every day.
My Grandmother was a Rhodian jew who spoke Ladino. She died last year but its always interesting to see greek jewish culture talked about
Glad to see you are still making videos in these trying times.
I'm from Thessaloniki and the central part of Labour Center of Salonika is named "Abraham Benaroya Hall". I love this guy❤ shalom le kulam
One small correction. Actually Greece never signed a deal with Bulgaria promising to give the land. That deal was with Serbia alone.
Ladino is fascinating, I made a video on it.. And it is rare that a language is able to keep itself in such an urban environment without a rural hinterland to draw from. A shame the Jewish Ladino speakers of Salonika suffered so badly later, gutting the core of the language and its demographic base.
In times like these, the famous quote by Yigal Alon, "A nation not honoring its past, lives a present of little substance and faces a future is clouded in doubt", gets a deeper meaning.
Thank you for continuing the series, you're doing an important and amazing work and it only keeps getting even better
It's always amazing when you get to actually visit places/monuments mentioned in your videos and I'm sure it will become a lot more common as we move further into the modern era. Especially nice to see you rest a stone on Benaroya's grave!
Surprisingly enough we learnt about the Socialist Federation of Thessaloniki here in Greece, it was one of the chapters in the history entrance exams
end of the video gave me the chills. love how you continued his story all the way to the modern day.
Really sad and moving story. He deserved far better as did others in his time and place.
Great to see that you're posting. Take care of yourself during these uncertain times.
I love that you touched upon the politics of the balkan sephardim , my family is from Izmir , salonika and Crete and its nice seeing some content about these communities which are often underlooked
This was a really captivating story. The stone on the grave at the end is very poignant. I love your very detailed, well researched and presented videos. I’m going to have to go find those 2 videos where you discussed the outbreak of WWI. Stay safe!
Being familiar with the Carassos of Salonika through Danone yogurt, I had absolutely no idea Isaac’s uncle had proposed Jewish autonomy in Salonika, and now I’ll spend a considerable part of next week contemplating that alternate history
Paradox will have a field day.
One of the best endings to one of your videos, really touching
I wept at the end. It was moving. I so appreciate your work.
great video sam, can't really explain how much i needed such a captivating video to forget even if for a bit what's been going on right now just 30 kilometers south from my house. thank you sam!
So happy to see a video. I was a little worried about you.
Thank you so much for the video! Your content is always a great comfort - and so grateful that you made it for us
In the early 20th Century when Turkish and Rhodes Jews started settling in Seattle and constructing the Ladino community, several prominent members were Benaroya family who came in from Salonika. I wonder if they have anything to do with the story...
I wrote this before and I'll write it again: Jack Benaroya came from Alabama and his parents came from Lebanon.
This is a very interesting take on a topic of Greek history that remains pivotal and controversial to this day.
What is the controversy? I find it vicariously frustrating that basically everyone's efforts on all sides were undone over the next 30 years: Greece overplayed its hand and lost most of its territorial gains from Turkey, the monarchy was overthrown, the Venizelists turned against the Jewish community and some of them committed a pogrom, Greece became a (pro-Allied) fascist dictatorship, the Nazis invaded, almost the entire Jewish population was wiped out, and then there was a civil war.
@@SamAronow You captured it - I was referring to exactly what you described. Everyone concerned lost an opportunity.
@@SamAronow the pro allied metaxas government could hardly be considered fascist it did copy the image but in policy it was very different first of all it has many pro-minority stances and was generally liked by the Jewish and Muslim communities and had many socialist policies with chief of labour being a communist, it lacked any expansionist or revisionist not even claiming the Dodecanese Islands in hopes of building better relations with Italian and promoted neutrality also lt had hopes that after it democracy would return and lastly if you remove the crack down on the Communists it to was tolerante of different ideology (it can be seen by many venizelist high ranking officers in the military
A masterpiece. Such a story, researched and told so nicely...
Glad to see you making new content. Learning about this history is more important than ever with the recent turmoil.
I love your shoutout to Benaroya. I never heard of the man before, so thank you for giving him the recognition he deserved.
Thanks!
Great video as usual! Not to "BALKANS MENTIONED", but it is great to see this story covered, since I had felt as though throughout this entire series, much of the Jewish history in non-Palestine Ottoman lands had largely been overlooked, given that the most major developments were typically either in Western Europe, the Pale in the East, or Palestine, just some mentions here and there.
I hope this might eventually lead to a video or two covering the history of Judaism either in the Balkans specifically, or more broadly the Ottoman Empire beyond Palestine, talking about groups such as the Romanyotim and the broader impact of the Sephardim in Jewish life in areas such as Greece, Anatolia and the Ottoman Balkans, as well as any figures that might be important to discuss specific in those contexts. The history of the Jewish people in these areas feels immensely undercovered, both domestically and internationally, so it would be amazing to see something like that covered, especially as a gentile Serb, since what very little I know of Jewish history in Serbia already shows it to have plenty of highs and lows.
Man i was waiting for a video about the Balkans for so long. Thank you Sam!(from Bulgaria)
yeah, we're getting niche. i love it!
Great video as always! Glad to see Bulgaria mentioned in a possitive light, especially with admitting things like the WMORO and Dimitar Wlahow being Bulgarian (which weirdly very rare). Not many Bulgarians know about Beneroja but he is very influential to us aswell, since he was one of the founding members of the BRSDP which would later go on to play a major role in our history trough splitting and forming the BKP out of said split, but it itself largely copied Beneroja's work in Thessaloniki. (It's also refreshing to see it shown albeit not mentioned that Greek authorities deported the Bulgarian population from Thessaloniki since that's very often denied)
Sad to know that next time Bulgaria is mentioned (if it even is) it will be trough the willingness of the government to sacrifice the Jews from Macedonia and Thrace (with the collaboration of the locals, in contrast with the Old Bulgaria citizens, who demanded the end of all deportations and protested them actively, meanwhile Macedonians hapilly took the left over property of their former Jewish neighbours) in order to save the Jews in the core territory, although I am still proud to say that the Bulgarian Exarchate (which back then wasn't corrupted by Communist intervention in church affairs yet) helped defend the rights of the Jews, and although it's highly debatable, I like to believe that, for whatever reason, be it his Jewish friends or his religiosity or love of the people, Boris III helped too.
Keep up the good work and even though I already commented it on your other posts I hope and pray that you, your family and your friends are safe wherever they are and that NYC is hospitable to your arrival!
Thanks, Sam. Educational stuff.
Can't wait for a more detailed treatment of the topic of Jews in (my native) Bulgaria. We do learn about saving our own Jews during the Holocaust. We learn less reliably about all the Jews we did help send to the concentration camps from other Balkan territories in the 1940s. But we don't really learn about who those Bulgarian Jews are, how they came here. We don't learn about what role they played in the first decades of the newly restored Bulgaria.
Bulgarian Jew here! My grandmother, who was born in Sofia, told me that the vast majority of the Bulgarian community was Sephardic and spoke Ladino, with Bulgarian as a second native language. They played a significant role in the healthcare system of the new Bulgaria after the collapse of the ottoman empire, but she never told me about any outsized role the Jewish community had back then. She did miss Bulgaria until her very last days, and she was ecstatic during their 1994 World Cup campaign 😊
I am not Bulgarian, but I am Jewish and went to Bulgarian years ago when I was a teenager. I cannot tell you how unnerving it was for everyone who learned or could tell I was Jewish to tell me, IMMEDIATELY, how they loved "their Jews" and saved "their Jews" during the Holocaust (and for me to later find out the limits of the historical reality of those statements), especially when juxtaposed with the evidence of Bulgaria's very poor treatment of the Roma minority. But I did love visiting the country and have always hoped to go back someday. Truly an incredibly rich culture of music and dance. And the food was great too.
Fascinating! Thank you very much for this. I’d always been curious about this aspect of modern greek history.
WOOOO BALKANS MENTIONED!!
And the first time modern Israel was mentioned
Your videos are so well done! You manage to combine plenty of information and explain it in a manner which is easy to assimilate. Thank you for your work! I'm going to make my way through as many of them as possible..
I did that thing where you hit the share button and copied the link to the video to boost its exposure. Any other viewers can do the same thing to help the video gain traction in the youtube algorithm.
Absolutely fantastic video, one of my favourites you've done!
8:30 thanks for the auditory flashback to the audiobook of BBC Ulster's A Short History of Ireland with that background music
Wake up babe, new Sam Aronow video just dropped and it's Bund time
I am so excited to see your video! Been worried about you.
There is an Irish folk song called Salonika that mentions the Irish soldiers stationed there as part of the Allies. Also, I think this is the reason why modern Irish folk music incorporated the bouzouki.
The bouzouki came to Ireland through Moynihan in the 60s, according to Wikipedia at least. It doesn't make sense that Irish troops would bring it since the bouzouki came to mainland Greece in large numbers only with the arrival of the Anatolian refugees. Macedonia, the area around Salonika was dominated by bagpipes, zurna flutes, tympans and violins in the area of Chalcidice. At the same time a tradition of copper wind instruments which have largely replaced the aforementioned wooden ones also started to see rise, but no real sight of the bouzouki in the area yet.
@@gnas1897 oh, thanks for the information.
Great video! One small correction though - Dimitar Vlahov was a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party at the time, but he was Macedonian. Later in life when Macedonia was liberated and joined the Yugoslav federation, he was a member of the Presidency of ASNOM.
I honestly thought the title read 'Buddhism in the Balkans'
Would have been cool if the Yugoslavs were Buddhist... They'd be less edgy
You might be thinking of "western/european modern buddism"(you know "keep the silhouette,empty the inside). Now i would suggest you look at Myanmar/Burmania and the Rohyingya people.
@@alexandrub8786As if Buddhism is the problem there. People are going to hate those who differ from them no matter the religion, at least Buddhist teaching doesn't encourage it unlike abrahamic religions.
Rohingya would've certainly faired worse in the west considering how we treated Roma and Muslims
@@unilajamuha91 this was not an attack on buddish,how you seem to have taken it. It is ,however, an attack at the idea that putting another religion in that region would make things better.
@@unilajamuha91 but considering that the buddist monks are proponents of it and one idea for the support of it being buddist nationalism maybe you are right that the religion(i.e. buddism) is part of the problem,at least in what partain the last wave of anti-rohyingyanism from late 2010' to today.
It-being the Rohyingya genocide.
@@alexandrub8786 Religious tensions were a major part of the conflict. I mean, the reasons why Bosnian Serbs and Bosniaks aren't the same people and genocided eachother is religion. Removing this differences would definitely calm things down, and even if we assigned different nations to different schools of Buddhism, it still will be a major difference, Buddhist infighting is very minor compared to Abrahamic religions "As many people as many ways"
In light of the attempted pogrom in Dagestan , I wonder. Could you do a video on mountain Jews
The grand father of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French head of state during 2007 to 2012 was a Bulgarian jew from Thessaloniki
his mom was born in thessaloniki i think, and her 1st language was judæo spanish
It took me 6 times watching it (what do you mean, you don't watch Sam Aronow's videos a dozen times?) to realize in the shower that "Federación" is the Ladino translation of the Yiddish "Bund" (meaning something close to "league")
Great upload! Thanks for the cool vids. Completely unrelated question but what is your favorite baseball team?
NL- Los Angeles Dodgers
AL- Chicago White Sox (RIP Sam Aronow the Elder)
CCL- Arroyo Seco Saints (Pasadena)
NCAA II - Cal State LA Golden Eagles/San Francisco State Gators
NPB- Hanshin Tigers
Israeli (2007)- Tel Aviv Lightning
Israeli (future)- Andromeda Jaffa
WBC/Olympics- whichever countries you wouldn't expect to be there; failing that, Canada and Mexico.
The KKE is still active in Greece.
I realize this is a super minor correction, but I fear Hulonim would absolutely hate to hear you describe their city as a "Tel Aviv suburb". While the two make a continuous urban environment, Hulon is a separate municipality.
"Suburb" in an American context refers to a feeder community separate from the main city, not merely a neighborhood.
This unknown to me chapper of history was very interesting. My wifes family are from those parts. This was Hypnotic. Yesshar koakh
Thank you.
I hate the fact that most of the communities mentioned here are gone almost completely apart from some gravestones, cemetaries or old buildings. I wish there were still Ladino speakers to visit in Saloniki, their culture enjoyed, their political organisations still present.
I visited Thessaloniki in 2019. There's still a good museum on the Salonica Jews there, but the community was so devastated by the Nazis that little else remains
Well done, well researched
Love the videos!! You should use that youtube function that allows you to add a separate audio track in hebrew
Wow. Loved the episode. Can you say which books did he write?
My brain initially misread this as "nudism in the balkans" and I was prepared for a very different kind of video
I read "Buddhism" and was wondering why Sam Aronow was the one posting it
Can't wait for the videos on the Australian bund and the workmens circle
Thank you for your kind words for Bulgaria. Usually the country is portrayed in a much more darker view when it comes to the Balkan Wars and the Balkan Jews.
17:19 horseshoe theory moment
There were also pro-war conservatives.
@@SamAronow Okay, political compass moment I guess.
What is the name of the music at the end?
This is a serious question Sam: Why Shostakovich?
1. Basic is not necessarily bad.
2. One of the big influences on this channel was OSP, and when using Waltz No. 2 I'm trying to convey the same cozy yet mysterious mood that they do when they use it. Whenever I use music from other TH-cam channels, movies, video games, TV shows, I'm trying to convey same tone that those media had when they used it.
Omniatlas, got it.
That got dark real fast at the end, but I suppose at least he escaped with his life, even if he lost everything else.
Thank you for all the work you have done! The Jewish history of the Thessaloniki is rarely mentioned in Greece today.
The biggest university of the city is build in the former Jewish cemetery. I think the plan before the war was to move the cemetery in another in location to make room for the campus. At the end the Nazis completely destroyed it during the occupation.
Adana incidents between turks and armenians from the perspective of british embassy. Ottoman authorities were so unprepared, British consul tried to calm things down (and eventually shot from arm by the armenians i think). "During the whole of the 15th, 16th and 17th April Adana became the scene of wide disorders. At the first sound of firing, the Armenians rushed to their own quarter, where they barricaded themselves and began to shoot at the Turks, who, Major Doughty Wylie reported, hunted them out from every corner and house-top, goaded on by hodjas (hocas-Muslim clerics) and reactionaries. The vali, Cevat Bey, who was a man of good character, but incapable of administering the province, and the ferik (local army commandant), who was Mustafa Remzi Pasha, an old man[75], were paralysed with shock, and retired to the shelter of the Konak (Government House), making no effort to call out the soldiers who could easily have quelled the mob, or to calm the storm. Major Doughty Wylie, the British vice-consul, however, after his arrival at Adana, went straight to Tripanis’s house, which was near the station. There he changed into his uniform, secured an escort, and set off to the Konak. He found himself in the midst of a furious Turco-Armenian carnage[76]. With about 50 Turkish soldiers, whom he got the authorities to place at his disposal, and the commandant of the gendarmerie, Major Doughty Wylie paraded up and down throughout the city with bugles blowing, rescuing foreigners, placing guards over foreign schools and missions and putting a stop to the fighting wherever he went." belleten.gov.tr/tam-metin/1994/eng
I don’t appreciate the infomercial for the map app
wanted to write this in the Nili episode but I saw you locked the comments so ill say it here:
1.are you going to mention the Weitzmann-Faisal agreement in future episodes?
2.seeing how you adressed the Armenian genocide, a heavy subject, and seeing that we are already covering the 20th century, I was wondering how you are going to cover such a heavier and more related subject as the holocaust.
1. I currently expect to mention it after the war. I even foreshadowed it in the Nili video! "...As we shall see after the war, the overlap between Jewish and Arab nationalist interests in 1917 wasn’t actually the existential turning point that later events would suggest."
2. I will go into greater detail on the Holocaust, but not exhaustively so, lest we spend whole years on it. The Second World War should also have an equal if not slightly greater amount of coverage of Jewish perspectives in the war itself, among the Allies and the Yishuv. Many people in Israel or among Americans who are not Jewish forget that the experience of most Jewish-Americans' (or Jews outside Europe generally) experience of that time period was as soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen and their families. My grandpa Sam was an essential worker in the US, uncle David served in China and the Philippines, and my uncle George served in the final downfall of Germany. Operation Torch, the Liberation of France, the Liberation of Italy, the Palestine Blitz, and the Manhattan Project are all full of fascinating Jewish stories I hope to tell when we get to them.
@@SamAronow Will Orde Wingate & the Jewish Night Squads will get their own episode? Cant wait, honestly.
Benaroya is a prominent Seattle family; I wonder how they’re related, if at all?
I had to look this up; apparently Jack Benaroya's parents immigrated from Lebanon to Alabama. So they're probably distantly related, but only distantly- similar to Vidal Sassoon (father from Thessaloniki) vs. the more famous Iraqi-Indian Sassoons.
Comment to boost statistics
It's a great shame we Greeks don't know more about him
Benaroya is a well known person to anyone who loves history and especially the most turbulent period in Modern Greek history (1909-1923).
What is the meaning of the numbers popping up in the lower left corner?
Those are footnotes. If you look in the description, you can see them linked to specific passages in my sources.
You're one of the few historians from TH-cam that actually have sources. @@SamAronow
Very interesting as always.
By my own research I stumbled over one Jewish figure in pre Ww2 Germany id love to hear more about, Hans - Joachim Schoeps.
From what I have seen it's a rather tragic story of a veteran of ww1 being caught up in the nationalist fervor in Germany at the time, but noticing to late he isn't included in those ideas
It's pronounced Ad-Ana. British media have been pronouncing it this way since the earthquake. My turkish college just smirks at the laziness.
After greeks took the city there was a great fire mostly affected jewish quarter which made over 50.000 jews homeless. There was also a boycott towards jewish businesses. Venizelos' position was officially ambivalent, sometimes supporting anti semitic attitudes. City's jewish population politically mostly aligned with king constantine against Venizelos.
what happened to your twitter?
I honestly wonder what would have happened if democracy had prevailed in the Ottoman Empire before WW1? Might the empire still be around today? Also if it were democratic Would it have stayed neutral or joined the entente?
Also I’ve noticed an interesting dichotomy between the ottoman and Russian 3empries during this time. Both were absolutist monarchies that attempted a transition to constituitonal monarchy but essentially ended up under authoritarianism under national sumptemacist leadership.
And yet the two empires had basically opposite policies toward Jewish people (until WW1).
Balkan mention!
Can you do a video about jewish population in Serbia, Montenegro and south slav parts of austro-hungary?
The Young Turks?
Where is Cenk Uygur in any of this?
So both the Young Turks (CUP) and Young Turks (media) got their name from the generic term "Young Turks" inspired by Sultan Selim III, who came to power at the same time as the first French Revolution and whose attempts at modernization made him a popular figure _in_ Revolutionary France. This phrase then came over to America and weirdly persisted after WWI (possibly because the US specifically avoided ever declaring war on the Ottomans).
@@SamAronow thank you, sir!
Fascinating story of how Bundism spread to Ottoman Salonika. The Jewish autonomy movements could not survive the end of empires and the advent of more homogeneous national states in both Ashkenazi and Sefardi eastern Europe. Nazism was the final blow. A Sefardi from Salonika who fought with the Communist partizans in Greece in WWII told me that the Greek Communists were anti-semitic.
Semites? Do you mean the people of the Middle East? Yes
Did you dropped the F bomb?
I'm living in Holon right now! Do you know where Benaroya lived or worked exactly? Is there at least a plaque to commemorate him at least?
I just checked Google Maps... There's not even a street named after him anywhere in the country. What gives?
Suggestion/Correction:
Dimitar Vlahov was not Bulgarian, he was Macedonian.
Now that we're in the 20th century I do wonder what your plan is when you catch up
Though, g-d help me I think a lot of fresh Jewish history is going to be written in the near future.
At a certain point, events will just be too recent for me to have anything to say. If I ever reach that point without burning out, it'll probably be sometime in the 1990s. But at that point I will be able to just pick and choose what I want to talk about.
@@SamAronow When you get to a point where the people in the events are still alive and active in politics, it's hard to make history about them because we don't KNOW what the historical effects will turn out to BE
@@samwill7259That happened in my Central Asia video, remember? It was a current event.
@@SamAronow Indeed I do remember that and it was a good sentiment then too. I know you'll keep churning out 99th percentile work either way, no matter what you choose to do. (You're the reason my lovely, convert brother think I'm such a good study, keep it up!)
@@SamAronowwould you ever consider expanding on the eras of the older videos since they were shorter in the start
Nazis left a part of mainland greece to be occupied by bulgaria between 1941-1944. Jews were systematically slaughtered by bulgarian occupation forces, since they occupied the place. In the rest of greece, unfortunately by the end of nazi occupation the germans sent to auswittch, most of the jews of greece. Greek-jews that survived, did so, with the help of their compatriots greeks, who were not antisemitic, as you state in this video , with a lot of confidence. Ask these jews who survived or their descendants, before declaring about greek’s feelings towards the jews.
I don't think there is a point to compete with other balkan nationalities who was the least antisemitic.
I read as Buddhism in Balkans. Over entire video I was like, OK great about Judaism, but where is Buddhism? 🤣🤣😂😂
Dimitar Vlahov was Macedonian
God fucking damn it not here too....
@@brm5844 Sorry for pointing out that a man who was a partisan and fought against Bulgaria in ww2 for an independent Macedonia was in fact Macedonian, and not Bulgarian.
@@GeoHdReal He was also kicked from ASNOM for speaking with a dialect that they deemed "too Bulgarian", argued that the 1932 decission of the Internationale to recognise Macedonia as a nation was a mistake openly in 1948 and was entirely sidelined and removed from the anthem for "pro-Bulgarian sentiments". None of this is "fascist Tatar propaganda", by your own logic I should be an ethnic Macedonian and this is all accepted facts in Macedonian historiography.
Nobody is threatining the modern Macedonian nation by stating that it originates from Bulgaria, and if all it takes for it to be destroyed is for historical facts to stop being falsified, maybe it shouldn't or couldn't exist at all.
@@brm5844 Not to be flippant but this is shockingly similar to nationalistic arguments between Americans and Canadians.
@@SamAronow I mean, it basically is exactly the same lol
Two nations that used to speak the same language
That were founded by the same people but developed very differently throughout history
And finally the smaller one hates the bigger one and denies any connections between the two
Sorry to israel for all the bads suffered from us